well, in my opinion... mechs are the hardest thing to draw--the closest I come are human-mech meshes, but yeah, anyway... kudos to you, because you've got a good looking mech there. =]
can't wait to see the color

Thanks sprout. I do better with mechs than I do with people. I suppose it's my background. Rather than take art classes in high school, I attended technical drawing studies instead. At least I had the chance to draw. We could also blame my constant exposure to blocky military equipment. But hey, that's the army for ya.

hey zoso, looking good so far m8 Great neat style and the construction looks pretty solid and convincing. Some areas are looking a lil flat like the gun and the right arm but you can probly fix that more once you've added colour to it. Look forward to seeing your final version!

That's sweet looking Zoso! You do great with technical work like mechs from what I've seen so far. I guess from what you said taking the technical classes helped. It reminds me kind of the art done by Ray Perez Jr. the illustrator for an RPG called RIFTS. I like. Can't wait to see a color version.

Looking good so far Zoso, the design of the mech has been executed really nicely, it's hard to find mech pieces that look convincing. I think once it is colored, you should or find someone to 3d model this perhaps? Anyhow looking forward to the colored version.

Nice mech. I like the overall design but the pose looks a little to strong. He feels a little unbalanced, like he's about to fall over. Seems like if that gun went off, the recoil would knock him over (unless that's the feel you're going for). Great work otherwise. Hope this helps.

In the spirit of keeping the forum kickin, here's some sampled of my current project. I posted a prelimary design and some sketches of this the other day. If you missed it you can check that out here.

This was all done in Photo Shop 5.5 with my trusty calcomp tablet in about 2 days, despite the distractions from kids, wife and pets. I started out with a stick figure and worked from there.

In case you're wondering the weapon is based upon the H&K G36, their latest offering in the assault rifle range. In this venue it's supposed to be a 60mm autocannon.

I'm going to finalize the shading and color this thing starting tonight, but for now I just wanted to give everyone a chance to see it and perhaps offer some advice. PS 5.5 is still fairly alien to me, so it's been slow going. It is nice to have all these layers to work with, but I have to figure out how to get this thing colored correctly.

The proportions and perspective have turned out well so far - thank heavens for all that technical drawing experience. I feel like this is a good drawing. However, a foreign eye will probably find a few mistakes. Please let me know what they are and how I might correct them. Heck, if you have any suggestions at all I would be glad to hear them.

Looking good so far. Just a couple suggestions for going further...try to indicate some backlighting to make the mech a little more dynamic and 3 dimensional. Make this backlight a different color from the lighting that the muzzle flash is giving off.

Also, you can make this mech look more interesting if you break up the figure with different textures/materials/tones/colors. I'm thinking that you might want to throw some dark greens in some of those panels or maybe add some silver trim here and there. Patches of rough material could help break up the overall smoothness of the figure unless you're looking to keep that. Just throwing some ideas at you that can help make this look a little more spectacular. Chipping army decals and stripes...I could go on. I'd visually show you what I'm mean with some of these ideas but I'm at work and it wouldn't look good to be working on something else =) If you want I can do something a little later. In the meantime, keep working at it, it's looking good man.

-Flinthawk

[This message has been edited by Flinthawk (edited December 27, 2000).]

Hey, I like the mech, and am just gonna suggest a way to go with coloring it.

In my opinion, the hardest part is already done: the structure of the mech is well thought-out and a light source has been picked. From now on it's just shading cubes.
Looks like you've started really carefully, not going much brighter or darker than the basic green you picked. This might be how you wanted it, but personally I like more dramatic lighting, so I tried something little different out:

I took your pic and applied some bright light (good you started with the middle value green) on the front side, thinking which areas should be lit and which not, then drawing borders and coloring their insides. (wonder if this makes sense, just check out the toes on the left foot, i outlined the should-be-bright areas like that before filling them with color).

Next step was to take a really dark green, and go over the shadow areas the same, but divided in two parts:
First I just colored the backsides of the parts, then went over the pic again looking for possible forms that would cast shadows over other objects and added shadows just measuring with eye.

Now that I look again, it looks like the gun fire is the light source, but actually my lightsource is somewhere on the upper right corner, I didn't think of the gun when I started out :)

And before you try anything out, remember that this kind of coloring is not really something I'm good at, so comic colorists, for example, might have different ways of finishing a pic like this. This is, however, the way I like to lay out the base on which I can start building detail.

I just colored this by making a new layer set on 'normal' on top of the pic and hitting it with paintbrush at 100% opacity. Multiply is good for keeping the lines but you need another layer for the highlights.

Btw. I strongly recommend filling the white background with some color, it doesn't hurt eyes as much and helps it see recognize subtle color changes on darker areas.

Thanks to everyone for their comments. I had allready intended to add some small details like warnings, labels and such. Having seen machines of war up close I know for sure they have all sorts of neat stuff like that on them. Some reflex highlights are in order as well.

Gecko, that's just about the look I am going for. Really hard light from the muzzle flash.

If you have ever seen an automatic weapon going off at night, it's pretty much a strobe light. The other thing I'm trying to get across is that this thing has a really flat paint-job. In the army we use something called CARC paint, which is VERY dull and just about soaks up light. The stuff causes cancer too I hear, but hey...

Well, it's about time I got back to work on this thingl. I'll post another progress pic tonight. I got the day off tommorow, so I'll probably be up all night working on this

Thanks n8. Yes, that's right - a GTO-Calcomp tablet. Originally made by CalComp, they went out of buisness and got bought up by GTO. I bought this thing about 2 years ago, and it's decent but TOO DAMN SMALL. I need one of those oversized Wacoms. I'm relatively happy with my Calcomp, but - mmmmmmmmm ... Wacom....

I've undertaken everyones suggestions and started coloring this thing with more dynamic/aggresive lighting in earnest.

Still not even close to being finished, but it's pretty well along. As you can see there are still a few undone areas, and some shadow detail that needs to be addes. I haven't touched the weapon at all yet.

So, here you go. Changed the background to grey to highlight the details a bit more and make it easier on everyones eyes.

Already looking a lot better!
Everything else looks good, except there's something funny going on with the breast plate.
The lighting makes it look non-symmetrical, as the sharp corner you implied with light is missing on the closer-to-viewer side, and the whole plate has a darkening gradient going over it, yet the gun fire would create uniform flat light on the whole plate.

Actually, now that I look closer, the non-symmetry of the breast plate is in the line drawing. that's causing the trouble

Allrighty, the shading is *mostly* finished. I still want to add some reflex highlights, but need to decide on a source for the light. That means background/context. Haven't thought of anything yet.

I added a couple of painted on symbols, and intend to work on some more as well as some "battle damage" later today. I'm thinking along the lines of impact craters from small caliber arms and maybe some burn marks. The doggone muzzle flash is still whipping my ass as well. I took it out entirely and will be working on that as soon as this gets posted.

This thread is getting a bit long in the tooth, so I may repost under a different topic if there aren't any replies.

As usual you can see it here at it's original rez. Looks MUCH better this way.